The literary sub-culture is storming the barricades over John Updike’s remarks about the future of publishing, the Internet, and the quotient of narcissism he equates with blogging. Miss Snark called Updike a nitwit in a post that helps illustrate some of what Updike has been trying to articulate, a task complicated by the release of his novel The Terrorist. The author is in the position of defending both his ideas and his most recent novel, all wounds self-inflicted to be sure, beginning with his speech at BEA.
Perhaps what he’s strugling with most is his perception that to be a writer in 1957 required a different set of skills than in 2006. It was a meritocracy then with publication the reward for elite talent. The process was pure because writers, novelists in particular, were revered in the United States as much as in Russia, Poland, India or Japan. Novelists were second only to poets in prestige. It was an elitist model, the consolation being only the best of the best made their way to having their books bound and delivered to dusty bookshops on Elm Street.
Updike’s memory is not faulty. He is perhaps insulated from the cultural whipsaw that has turned elitism on its ear and pushed the publishing buisness from first class all the way back to the bar car where the most influential tend to be the loudest. There’s a party going on. 74 million people are back there saying whatever pops into their minds and everyone is talking at once. Drinks are on the house, John. Have a few belts and try not to cringe when a frothy guy puts his arm around your shoulder and tells you that he’s a writer too.
[...] David Thayer speculates on what the hell Updike is getting at. [...]
Hmm. Agree with your thrust here, but disagree heartily that publishing was more of a meritocracy back in 1957.
It is true that being a ‘novelist’ in the literary sense was a prestige occupation back then. But I think this has to be balanced against the fact that, even though we had our literary icons, many of whom actually knew how to write, it was far far easier to achieve publication when Ike was president.
Even up into the 1970s–and not only in the genre ghettos–the bar on publication was set rather low. The fact that today the industry’s big push is often behind a few semi-literate books does not mean that the average quality of material being published has declined. Browse through the paperback section of a used bookstore and you’ll see what I mean–or you would were it not for the fact that the shoddily bound stuff from the 50s and 60s has already yellowed and fallen apart.
The web isn’t really at the opposite end of the spectrum from a meritocracy. The opposite end of the spectrum would be talk radio, where the filter acts to select that which is unmeritorious. The web is just plain random.
Back in the 1950s, when the guys who collected money in parking-garage booths read books between customers instead of watching tiny TVs, there was a mountain of unreadable crap published every year. I don’t know an aspiring writer today who wouldn’t have been snatched up in 1955, though they might have had to write Westerns to start out. (That’s where folks like Elmore Leonard learned the craft, and back then you could learn it as you went.)
I think Updike’s real complaint is that he used to be the recognized king of a huge country–a country where most of the inhabitants were smelly peasants publishing Westerns and Sci-fi, true–but he sat at the top of the heap, and most of those lower in the heap recognized his royalty.
The internet is also filled mostly with smelly peasants, but they are like the anarcho-syndicalist commune peasants in Monty Python and the Holy Grail–they lack the good grace to be aware that they have a king.
Your comment is meatier than my post, a classic example of the anarchy you allude to. It is a curious thing that the bar to publication is now higher but the quality seems lower except in certain genres such as crime. Updike’s kingdom has been diminished by the folly of ignorance?
I think the problem is a growing lack of diversity in what publishers are willing to take on (the chickenshit factor). In the past, a wide array of books were published with the expectation that most would have modest sales at best and then sink into the mire; and most authors were expected to publish five, six, seven books without striking gold.
Things are more selective now, and there are two bars–a lower bar on minimum skills, and an upper bar on how different your book can be from the flavor of the week. Instead of making sure you have to get your book over the lower bar, you now have to manage to throw it between the ever-narrowing gap of both bars. This weeds out a lot of crap that shouldn’t be published, but also puts a big hurdle in the way of anything interesting.
We used to own a 1907 house in Seattle–a real oddity, built on a hillside with a basement dug into the hill, so you had a basement with a view.
The original house (it had a lot of additions clinging to it, like barnacles ona whale) was built of post-and-beam construction, and the timbers exposed down in the basement were jaw-dropping in size. The whole core of the place was built as if someone in 1906 had anticipated the development of nuclear weapons.
I was down there one time with a contractor, looking to have some work done on the floor (actually, to have one poured–the thing was still bare clay). I made the usual inane ‘sure don’t build them like they used to’ comment.
The contractor pulled off his baseball cap, scratched his head as though wondering whether to bother, and finally said, “Well, actually, most stuff today is crap, and most stuff back then was crap too. We just think old stuff was well-built because the good ones are still around to look at.”
Generally I do not post on blogs, but I would like to say that this post really forced me to do so! really nice post.